quinta-feira, 1 de outubro de 2009

I find it amazing that when "the man who gets desktop Linux" came and delivered an interesting talk on cadence, quality and design (important things that desktop Linux has traditionally missed and Ubuntu is pushing) all people are talking about is his supposedly sexist jokes. The pattern of amplifying some not so relevant details from someone's speech, while forgetting the main points, is usual on politics but that much on the Free Software community. So, all the noise [1,2,3...] around Shuttleworth's jokes is not something I would expect.

But since we are at it, some quick notes:

1- the word "guys" is not gender specific; can be used for a group even if there are only girls in it2- to think women get more offended than men regarding mildly sexual puns is even more sexist than telling the jokes3- the modern way of reacting to a sexist joke is telling a better one, not playing over sensitive4- girls complained about the jokes but if they can't deal with something soft like this how will they handle a typical Free Software flame war [1,2,3...]?5- and yes... explaining Free Software to girls is an issue as typically they aren't interested enough to hear all that's needed to get it right (see? it's interest and patience not difficulty...); whatever comes that makes it easier is welcome... otherwise let's talk about something else :)

The reason there are not so many women on the Free Software community has nothing to do with sexism. There's few women in IT as there's few women in Engineering in general. It just means that statistically they're more interested in other things. The ones who are interested are certainly welcome as are males of different ages, colors, countries, continents, shapes, religions and sexual preferences. In fact gender is just a normal attribute of the data structure that makes our representation of a human being. Why would the community be tolerant on all other attribues and play unfair on this one? Nonsense.